Because it, according to black people, is. You should say black people, not blacks. Minor issue of course (compared to all the other problems atm), but it just is a little bit if dehumanization, which I saw brought up a lot in the recent protests. (Now that there is some momentum, black people are bringing these frustrations up hoping we will finally listen).
I also understand there's a movement to use "enslaved people" rather than "slaves" given that the former emphasizes their social position rather than their 'nature.' Likewise, saying "blacks" rather than 'black people' is, as you point out, centers race than the reality, which is the construction of a racial category imposed on a group of people.
This is pretty important tbh, as the 'well, judged by the values of their time what they did is normal' defense of slavery, kinda forgets to take the opinion of the enslaved into account for example. And for some reason I don't think the enslaved people were all that happy about it.
Right. My understanding is that the new historiography emphasizes agency and slave rebellions in the collapse of chattel slavery. Not benevolent "enlightened" masters or some shit.
I think the discourse gets complicated by the fact that just about all slaves didn't want to be slaves* that didn't neccessarily mean everyone was opposed to slavery on an institutional level: "I don't want to be a slave", "I don't want my people to be enslaved" and "Slavery should not exist" are different propositions.
* Exception probably being people like the Köprulu viziers, for whom slavery was the path to GREAT POWER MWAHAHAHAH!
That centering language is more of a SJW thing as opposed to a black thing. It's more that saying "the blacks" has been coded as something racists people do so it might be considered as something a racist white person would sag
This is what black people have been saying, in various places (and at least they have in .nl) and of course it is from the dutch activist side, as otherwise we don't listen to black people and they don't show up in our media. (And normal black people are sick and tired of explaining race things to their white friends).
I genuinely could not care less
If I cared even less than I care I would literally be dead
It is a non-fucking-issue so stop making me want to top myself
In addition, in the only three times the word “whites” appears in that thread that ctrl+f can find, it appears once alongside “blacks” and twice alongside “Asians” so I’m not finding any inconsistency there
Why do you expect consistency in a norm that is being changed?
People will fuck up, it is just a thing people are trying to improve upon. And yes people should say white people or asian people etc. But white people are not often at risk of being dehumanized for example.
Context is important, as is looking at the central point being made.
Black people asked for this.
And there also are a lot of indigenous people who are not happy being called 'natives' but as I said before, compared to other issues they don't consider it a big priority, at least according to my white ass. Like they want healthcare, the money the US promised and never gave them (in the US), or to stop the desolation of their lands (in Cananda).
Why are you being so weird about this? 'white crusader activists' wtf?
I can’t wait until technology has advanced such that we can scan this
guy’s brain in sufficient detail to make one million emulations of him,
all of which will attempt to troll twitter by making this same
faux-ignorant racist joke, then in response we sleep with all of their
wives at once, creating a kind of cuck-agony critical mass we can
harness as an infinite source of clean and efficient energy for future
generations.
This is a hobby, in normal times I have a life outside the internet as a ridiculous barfly wit, substance and sex addict, and wannabe academic and musician
Obviously in lockdown this is not the case
>Also, I can't describe my dislike for peopel who are doing this and then going 'im just asking questions, I wasn't racist honest'
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1273366206511149057
Gollee gee my mistake.
wow wait, the swastika is a nazi symbol and the nazis did WHAT? sorry for wearing it, I didn't mean offense.
At least nobody seems to be buying it.
Also: https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1213527069570863104 Kinda hard you to keep pretending you didn't know when you have a twitter history, where you talk about others finding it offensive.
> Sixth meditation on superweapons
I got curious, so found this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170102123432/http://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html
"When I read feminist posts I get mad and want to comment, so I reread them looking for some quote to savagely tear apart and mock but it turns out that everything they wrote is true and good. Fucking feminists and their superweapon!"
> It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally realised that the most irritating and (to his fans) most compelling thing about Scott posts is that he refuses to summarise his overall thesis in the first few paragraphs
> It lends the whole thing an air of mystery that attracts people who are blindsided by the ridiculous verbosity and endless locutionary rhetorical-question making, and gives him massive room to talk utter utter incoherent shit for thousands of words
I was gonna say this is probably the most characteristic feature of "rationalist" writing, but it looks like I got beat to the punch.
I'm sure I've said before, I'd heard about Yudkowsky from his fans for quite a while before I read anything of his. And one of their central claims was that academic philosophy has gotten off track because it lacks rigor in how it's presented, that academic philosophers aren't careful enough to define their terms and aims, that they don't proceed in a manner sufficiently informed by the latest advances of science, and so on. Naive that I was, the--even as such, not entirely flattering--image I had at that point of "rationalist" writing was that it would exhibit a kind of nerdy sterility that just misses the point, but at least conveys the kind of rigor that these fans had complained academic philosophy lacks.
Imagine my shock to find that these people carry on for pages upon pages with weird parables, that--nevermind the first few paragraphs--one rarely finds any thesis statement from them ever, that the extent of their engagement with science is to replace conventional words with sciencey-sounding neologisms (so that 'introspection' becomes 'output of reflective brain processing' and so on, without the slightest change of meaning, let alone reference to any scientific finding).
And this really does strike me as their characteristic feature. Oodles of other people talk about AI, engage cognitive science, explore formal methods in philosophy, and so on. But no one has quite cornered the market in directionless, neologism-laden, vague ruminations the way they have.
The aesthetics of science/rigour over and above the actual rigour, a dance as old as science itself
I suppose analytic philosophy has its own equivalent thereof, but it’s qualitatively different and not as egregious
Mostly the “rationalist” movement absorbed Yudkowsky’s own egotistic impulses and just ran with it, I guess
> Imagine my shock to find that these people carry on for pages upon pages with weird parables, that--nevermind the first few paragraphs--one rarely finds any thesis statement from them ever
I think it's a narcissism thing, throwing stones in the glass houses.
As far as academic philosophy goes the bits that rationalists like also seem to be quite bad when it comes to rigor. It's not like rationalists have any interest in philosophy that is very rigorous (foundations of mathematics, that kind of thing). The things they do have interest in...
Bostrom for example, he got all those paradoxes where a hypothesis simply "spams" a very very large number of people. Being a fuzzy philosophical hypothesis, it isn't singling out one person's eyes to predict what you'll see next, therefore no complexity required for choosing 1 out of many, which is kind of a big deal if "many" is some astronomically large number. Consequently weird probabilistic "confidences" in bizarre shit like living in a simulation. Intrudes on physics (which is the science of figuring out the ultimate structure of the universe we are in, simulation or otherwise).
Or decision theory, with parables ala Newcomb's Paradox or Death in Damascus or the like. They came up with all those weird parables, as if they could handle actual practical problems like, say, a triple redundant autopilot (which poses an issue to any decision theories that try to "hardcode" causality, because one autopilot's dissenting decision would be overruled by the other two, making it to where the plane's flight is not a causal consequence of any one autopilot's decision, but of the other two).
Engineers doing philosophy is bad, philosophers intruding into engineering is worse, and amateur uneducated folk philosophers are even worse.
I suspect that basically rationalists are interested in more dubious areas of philosophy so they can do them even worse.
That is a very good point. Doesnt just apply to scott of course but also to yud and moldy.
Bit weird in retrospect considering what they seem to want to do (exception is moldbug here, as apart from him going 'i wanted to invent a new political ideology' i never got his goals)
We used to have a guy on a discord server I was helping run who was otherwise nice, but clearly troubled, and weirdly defensive of Bill Buckley
Buckley attracts a lot of people who are more interested in superficial erudition than actually thinking things through - in a different but no less pernicious way than Heidegger if you ask me, although having read a bit of Heidegger at least he’s basically got something interesting to say when he’s not advocating for Hitler...
But you get into what you get into and nothing in the world is gonna change that fact, maybe you make a recovery from being bigoted, maybe you don’t: reading Nick Land isn’t going to help with the former option
I mean didn't Buckley hang out with the Discordians and Subgenii people in the early 70s? I remember reading something where they mentioned some of the early Discordians knew people who worked with National Review jn the 1970s and whatnot. So I guess it's not surprising you could go from National Review style conservatism to Nick fucking Land.
Edit: also Heidegger was a literal Nazi so that might "rub off" a bit regarding the 'anti Semitic slurs'
Yeah that is the post. I know about the archive but try not to link to it because sa deleted his ljournal because of doxing risks.
The infuriating thing about that post is that he only ever seems to have applied this concept against feminism. (And also that he himself applies some of the things he accuses feminists of here himself against the groups he dislikes, not as directly, but there often is a weird undertone in the anti progressive anti socialist/communist posts).
Alexander did a review on Khrushchevite Soviet Union though, *Red Plenty* where he talks a bit about socialist economics and whatnot. Though I guess we could have him ready some of the stuff on CYBERSYN and Stafford Beer's writings.
So what food is appropriate to eat to celebrate Juneteenth? We
actually like fried chicken & watermelon a lot.
In other news, I just discovered Yudkowsky blocked me on twitter. I
guess telling him that his ideas for police reform sucked cuz it didn’t
include defunding them really hurt his feelings ;_;
These people make Taleb’s IYI label seem ever more adequate every
time they spout anything. They’re also doing a very good job at making
the word intellectual a word that you wouldn’t want associated to you.
One feels tempted to make the word intellectual just a synonym for idiot
already
For some reason, this construction always makes me think the author is racist. God what a creep.
I can’t wait until technology has advanced such that we can scan this guy’s brain in sufficient detail to make one million emulations of him, all of which will attempt to troll twitter by making this same faux-ignorant racist joke, then in response we sleep with all of their wives at once, creating a kind of cuck-agony critical mass we can harness as an infinite source of clean and efficient energy for future generations.
Shoutout to the Sixth meditation on superweapons, where ssc explicitly calls these kind of ‘jokes’ bad.
Of course, this sixth meditation post no longer exists.
Also, I can’t describe my dislike for peopel who are doing this and then going ‘im just asking questions, I wasn’t racist honest’.
In other news, I just discovered Yudkowsky blocked me on twitter. I guess telling him that his ideas for police reform sucked cuz it didn’t include defunding them really hurt his feelings ;_;
Tweet is not available, anybody got a screenshot?
They really should just come out and rename it the “Future of (some of) Humanity Institute”.
Robincel Hanson
These people make Taleb’s IYI label seem ever more adequate every time they spout anything. They’re also doing a very good job at making the word intellectual a word that you wouldn’t want associated to you. One feels tempted to make the word intellectual just a synonym for idiot already
something something penalties for cuck
It seems fucked up not to have potato salad.